HUNTLEY PROJECT — A lifetime habit of keeping detailed journals of the day’s events has evolved into a book for a Huntley Project native who became a counter spy for the FBI.
Dorwin Schreuder lives in Bozeman now, but grew up here and graduated from Huntley Project High School. During his FBI career, he kept detailed notes of cases and assignments, diaries his grandson Adam discovered in his home one day and encouraged him to publish.
“I had no intention of writing a book when I started,” Schreuder said, although he saw the value of preserving his stories for his grandchildren and beyond. His father was part of his inspiration to create the book, “Grandpa’s Diary, From Country Boy to Counter Spy.”
“My dad was a great storyteller,” Schreuder said, “and when he died it was like burning a library.”
At first, “I thought, I’d write down his story.” But then, he attended his 50th class reunion here, which led to a lot of “remember when” stories with classmates about their early years.
Those classmates told him he should write a book.
“I had so much encouragement,” he said. Some of his friends (who appear in some of his stories) wanted more stories about the early homestead days. Some wanted to hear more about his FBI days.
Schreuder places great credit with the Huntley Project School system for his career success.
“The HP schools were a little system” when he was enrolled, he said. “My childhood in this little system and out there in the county prepared me to think on my own, out alone by myself when it really mattered.”
Part of his story-telling recalls the daily life of growing up on the Project, riding bikes, swimming, playing (and fighting) on the school playground and even occasional brushes with the law in the person of the local sheriff.
The whole story almost ended at the age of 3, when he wandered a quarter mile from home and fell into an irrigation ditch. As he grasped the grass growing on the edge of the ditch, the family collie ran home and alerted his mother, who hauled him out.
From then on, the dog, Goldie, enjoyed a special place of honor in the home, he recalled.
His grandson, Adam, is listed on the cover of the book, which also shows Schreuder as a child in front of his boyhood home and an overlay of the telegram he received from J. Edgar Hoover appointing him to the FBI.
He told Adam he could edit his writings as needed and publish the book.
“It was a joint effort,” Schreuder said. “Most all of it is my writing.”
Many of the early stories recall things that happened that seemed ordinary at the time, he said.
“There were many trivial incidents that do not rate as exciting literary material,” Schreuder writes. “But when I put the right focus on them, they become important occurrences.”
“Readers like to be reminded of these stories,” Schreuder said during his interview at the Yellowstone County News. Readers like to hear about historical things.
Schreuder is a soft-spoken man in his 70s. His speech is sprinkled with humor, often self-deprecating, and his stories hit the right note of entertainment mixed with serious elements of tailing, and catching, international spies.
Schreuder’s grandfather, John Schreuder, homesteaded on Road 13 and his father, Jake, was born over on Road 12 “so he expanded his world about two miles from where he was born,” Schreuder said.
His grandfather emigrated from Holland and worked for a time in Billings, shoveling coal and laying cobblestones on Montana Avenue. When they opened the Huntley Project area to homesteading, John Schreuder walked along the Yellowstone River from Billings “as far as he could in a day,” Dorwin Schreuder said. “He thought he should be a day’s walk from a town. The selection of where he homesteaded had something to do with a day’s walk.”
Schreuder graduated from HP in 1960 after a successful high school career.
“I was just an active kid in a small school,” he said. He won awards from football, basketball and track, the John Philips Souza award for music and other awards that hung on school walls before fire destroyed the old high school.
“I had good grades,” he said with an implied wink. “I never got caught at anything serious so I left there with a clean slate.”
He went on to graduate from Montana State College, now MSU-Bozeman, in 1964.
“At that time, there was a man over in Vietnam who had a job for me,” Schreuder said wryly. He entered the U.S. Air Force but after his eardrum ruptured twice in airplanes, he applied to the intelligence division and was assigned to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) as an investigator.
Eventually, he left the military and worked briefly for a Montana company that made farm equipment like chisel plows. He didn’t like it.
“I lasted about eight months,” he said. “I called an FBI friend in Rapid City and he sent me an application.”
Working in Fort Benton, he received word via Hoover’s telegram that he had been selected for the FBI.
“I got the Teletype and the rest is history,” he said.
He, his wife and toddler son moved to Quantico, Virginia, almost immediately, he said, the first of many moves in his 26-plus year FBI career.
“In 10 years we moved 11 times,” he said. It was too much for his first wife.
“Some of that is my fault because I kept volunteering for new and exciting things, more education,” he said. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in behavioral science and taught in police schools across the country.
There, he learned the value of some of his stories of working FBI spy cases. His police officer students were streetwise and skeptical they could learn anything from him.
“What works out of a book doesn’t always work on the street, that’s for sure,” Schreuder said, but his experience mostly won over the police students.
“I did a lot of fugitive stuff,” Schreuder said. ‘Bank robberies, cases called ‘reactive’ — you’ve got to get after them right away. I like to tell about the people and how we reacted,” stories that are detailed in his diaries and again in his book. But he doesn’t reveal FBI techniques or practices that could be a security risk.
“I never did that,” he said.
And his rural background helped him work with other agents, local sheriffs and even suspects, he said, when he landed at a crime scene where nobody knew him.
Instead of a hard-nosed FBI man who knew it all (a common stereotype, he said) his approach was more folksy.
“I’d come out as a Montana country boy,” he said. “I was one of them, that come from the Yellowstone River.”
It was a sincere gesture, not an act, he said. Some of those rural officers were only a couple years out of high school and already settled in the job they were likely to always have.
“I got the education and training and some of them didn’t have that chance,” he said.
His dad, the storyteller steeped in Yellowstone County history who never ventured far from home, “used to say how lucky I was,” Schreuder said. “And I said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.'”
